Abstract
Pictures and film clips are widely used and accepted stimuli to elicit emotions. Based on theoretical arguments it is often assumed that the emotional effects of films exceed those of pictures, but to date this assumption has not been investigated directly. The aim of the present study was to compare pictures and films in terms of their capacity to induce emotions verified by means of explicit measures. Stimuli were (a) single pictures presented for 6 s, (b) a set of three consecutive pictures with emotionally congruent contents presented for 2 s each, (c) short film clips with a duration of 6 s. A total of 144 participants rated their emotion and arousal states following stimulus presentation. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that the film clips and 3-picture version were as effective as the classical 1-picture method to elicit positive emotions, however, modulation toward positive valence was little. Modulation toward negative valence was more effective in general. Film clips were less effective than pictorial stimuli in producing the corresponding emotion states (all p < 0.001) and were less arousing (all p ≤ 0.02). Possible reasons for these unexpected results are discussed.
Highlights
There is a longstanding tradition in psychological research of trying to create emotional states in the laboratory for scientific aims
International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures have been used in a wide range of research topics and are typically shown for a duration of 6 s (e.g., Vrana et al, 1988; Bernat et al, 2006; Codispoti et al, 2006; Rhudy et al, 2007)
Even though there are many theoretical arguments in favor of films, very little empirical evidence can be found. To address this lack of research we developed a set of film clips that is formally comparable to the already established IAPS pictures, by reducing each film clip to 6 s in duration
Summary
There is a longstanding tradition in psychological research of trying to create emotional states in the laboratory for scientific aims. Several methods have been described, including hypnosis (i.e., Bower, 1983) and imagery (e.g., Lang, 1979), music (e.g., Sutherland et al, 1982), facial muscle movements (Ekman et al, 1983), interaction with trained confederates (e.g., Ax, 1953), the Velten/self-statement technique (repeating phrases with emotional content, Velten, 1968) and even drugs and sleep deprivation (cf Martin, 1990; Hagemann et al, 1999) Some of these methods bring ethical problems (e.g., drug intake, use of deception) and/or problems of standardization. A variation of the Emotion Elicitation usually implemented version, which has shown good results with respect to emotional impact, is the presentation of three successive images with congruent emotional and thematic content for 2 s each (Godinho et al, 2006)
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